This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Should hate speech be outlawed? Use of the N-word say.

In the US, extensive free speech is said to be guaranteed by the First Amendment. But in Europe there are laws

that restrict speech targeting particular groups, racist speech for example. Should America

be more like Europe? Yes, says Ray Langton of MIT.

The mistake made by free speech fundamentalists

is to regard speech as nothing but harmless words.

Ray Langton, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you, Nigel. Thanks for inviting me.

The topic we're going to focus on today is hate speech.

Could you say what hate speech is?

I don't have any special definition but when you see how people

have talked about hate speech you can see that one important idea is that of words or

pictures that do something distinctive to a certain class or group of people.

So for instance, the UN describes hate speech as incitement to hatred or promotion of hatred or incitement to violence

against members of certain groups or hatred towards members of certain groups and

it asks its member states to have legislation that will penalize

that sort of speech.

So that's one idea which I'll put together under the idea of propaganda.

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